Thomas Vladimir Brønd

As we have seen in Introduction by the editors, this volume is concerned with looking anew at contemporary military action or, in other words, the work of armed forces in theater. This epilogue argues for the vitality of this perspective by making fairly simple observations regarding both what is lacking in our existing knowledge and what is present and new in these collected chapters. The bottom line, which we might as well skip to now, concerns the special alchemy of the two words “mission” and “formation”. An interrogation of missions, rather than functions or ecologies, strikes me as enormously productive and is most compelling when coupled with an analytically open approach to “formations”.

The study of military action by behavioral scientists is usually constrained for reasons of difficulty getting access and doing the research on processes of action. The first part of this chapter explores several approaches to the study of combat formations. The second part presents empirical information based on the personal experiences of the author. It briefly covers four distinct case studies on the micro, meso and macro levels of operational activities. The first two case studies cover unintended formations during terror attacks; the third case study covers air–ground combat formations; the fourth case study covers ad hoc military–police formations during internal policing in the disengagement from Gaza in 2005. The chapter presents the knowledge, research design and a variety of methods that are required for the proper analysis of mission formations.